Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

ALEXANDRA GAJDA

The tract was not entered in the Stationers’ Register, and Essex’s servants helped Archbishop Whitgift hunt down the printer, one Dawson, who was briefly imprisoned. The print run of 292 books was called in and most copies destroyed. 11 And yet the posthumous edition of 1603 does seem to have been printed without any controversy: it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 8th May, as was an abundance of other ballads and poems praising the earl that appeared immediately after the death of Elizabeth. 12 The political toxicity of Essex’s Apologie was brief. If the printing of the Apologie was undesired by Essex, its circulation in manuscript is a very different matter. Although Essex claimed that the tract had been one of his private papers, and stolen from his bedchamber, it seems almost certain that the earl had intended this tract to be circulated scribally at the very least amongst a select readership at court and in London. 13 This was a practice that was widely used by his secretariat and clients when they were trying, for example, to set forth an Essexian version of the raid on Cadiz in 1596. 14 But the most compelling evidence that this text was intended to have some sort of wider audience derives from the genre within which Essex couched his political advice. The tract is framed as a personal letter to Anthony Bacon who, at the time of composition, was living at Essex House working as Essex’s intelligence agent, and who hardly required the earl to write him a stirring letter setting out his foreign and domestic policy objectives. The use of the epistolary form, however, was a common means of framing a political treatise in early modern Europe, although the personae ‘narrating’ these artificial epistolary treatises were usually fictitious. The first of the radical presbyterian tracts by ‘Martin Marprelate’, published in October 1588, was a hilarious satire on conformist churchmen presented as an Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House , while the most famous catholic libel, Leicester’s Commonwealth, published in 1584, a monstrous slander of the morality of the earl of Leicester, was styled as ‘a letter written by a Master

11 Cecil Papers, Hatfield House, 79/37, 41. Richard Barkley to Sir Robert Cecil; 75/40, Whitgift to Sir Robert Cecil. Whitgift claimed to have called in 210 of the 292 copies printed. 12 See, for example, George Carleton, Devoraxeidos (1603); Robert Pricket, Honors Fame in Triumph Riding. Or, the Life and Death of the Late Honorable Earl of Essex (1604); Anon., A Lamentable Ditty Composed upon the Death of Robert Lord Devereux, Late Earl of Essex (1603). 13 Cecil MS 79/74; Gajda, Earl of Essex , pp. 99, 173. 14 Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Myth-Making: Politics, Propaganda and the Capture of Cadiz in 1596’, The Historical Journal , 40:3 (1997), 621-642.

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